Rust Global Update [05/30/2020]

[Nutter 15,189]

 

Moving forward, there should be zero excuses for shortcomings in terms of Rust moderation or else I will take action on my end. Please refer to the bottom of this post if you wish to read more.

PLEASE NOTE: SOME CHANGES WILL REQUIRE A SERVER RESTART BEFORE THEY TAKE EFFECT

 

Rules

Post has been updated with new information, additionally, the rules now explicitly state these limits apply to BASING as well as player-interaction related rules explicitly apply to CHAT and not VOICECHAT

On 10/9/2019 at 5:28 PM, Garnet said:

• Do not use offensive/foul language in global chat or PMs to another users.
  • This includes: hate speech, trolling, and cyber racism.
• Raiding, basing, and roaming groups cannot consist of more than what is defined in the server's descrption (Being in alliance does not exempt you from this rule)
  • [US] Oscar 5x - Max size of 5 (clan)
  • [US] Sierra 2x - Max size of 3 (trio)
  • [US] Epsilon 2x - Max size of 5 (clan)
  • [US] Anarchy 1000x - Max size of 3 (trio)
  • [EU] Delta 2x - Max size of 3 (trio)
  • [US] Main Vanilla - unlimited OFFLINE
  • [US] Sigma 2x - Max size of 2 (duo)
  • [EU] Main Vanilla - unlimited OFFLINE

 

 

 

Automated Moderation

Removed chat filter with racist trigger-words

Moving forward we should have staff around at all times within our servers to moderate and handle toxic users

 

 

Chat Delay

Staff members can now bypass the chat cooldown (1 message/10 seconds)

 

 

 

Raidblock

Removed building block upgrade penalty

This feature would set an upgraded wall to 3% of its original health upon upgrading while raidblocked. It served as a remedy to a problem rather than a solution.

 

 

 

Information Board

Accessible via /info

Removed the STAFF tab from all servers due to inability to automate due to the lack of mysql

 

 

 

Teleportation

Accessible via /tpr - Teleport Request

Fixed the inability to teleport to users who are above waters as well as set homes above water

 

 

 

1000x Anarachy Server

Instant Craft

Fixed issue disallowing players from utilizing instant craft. All items will craft in 1 second.

 

Killfeed

Disabled death messages from printing into chat - these will now exclusively post to our Discord

 

Map Rotations

Attempted to fix issue with the server only rotating between 2 seeds

 

 

 

Discord

Moderation

The following users have been set to the Rust Moderator rank and had their permission-sets fixed

Exit, ItssBio, Spilq, Venomous, Brooklyn, Mightydylan101

 

Bot Channels

Players can no longer type in botted channels

 

Misc Channels

Reports and Appeals as well as Donate have been detailed with more information, pinned, and 'locked' for comments.

 

 

 

Forums

Rust main forum will now display to users not yet signed in as to not drive Rust members away

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WARNING:

SUPER LONG

no TL;DR provided at this time.

 

 

Sorry.

 

 

I'm going to be incredibly honest and open with everybody, as I feel this post is warranted. it has come to my attention there was little-to-no-change to Rust since having Chewy onboard as a paid part-time role "freelancer" or "manager", whichever title you choose - the amount agreed upon by myself and Chewy was a bit higher than what I had intended, and so, I was really looking forward to positive results being that Chewy is a full grown man that carries himself well with much better people skills than what I typically find in people playing within this community. (the amount after our first month of trial is to be more than what Rust makes in general).  I agreed to this and sought out for a manager seeing as I do not have the time to moderate ANY of the servers at this point, due to the high maintenance and now literally DAILY updates. I am at a point of time where I am working on and maintaining our community for a MINIMUM of 10 hours a day while blocking the outisde world for atleast 5-6 days a week. I really just wish for the Rust community to be able to enjoy Garnet servers, and see Rrust grow larger than it already has.

 

It has now been more than 15 days since the hiring of Chewy and to be quite frank, I personally have not seen much change/players have reported much of the same to me, and I am also aware this is CONSTANTLY being ENTIRELY blamed on my own short comings and/or my lack of attention to Rust. Just to clarify, this is not something I am throwing the blame over to Chewy on, but I am simply pointing out. Chewy has no control over other staff's behavior, he simply has the powers to choose who makes it to staff, who doesn't, as well as accepting reports, which to my best knowledge he has been doing.

 

Personally, I had taken a look at discord and the forums, and unfortunately evidence says otherwise (as for it being my own shortcoming) as people are crying out for help and nobody's responding to them or their staff applications.

3 pages of staff applications:

This is a matter I had brought up with Chewy, and I believe his response was something along the lines of him feeling confident that the 8 current staff (half of which were around before the paid-role came about were present). That is understandable, however, i'm unsure of why they are not making forum accounts and aiding on said reports and/or engaging on the forums.

 

I looked back at Chewy's last ~20 messages on Discord, and felt it was necessary to post 3 of them which either include condescending/mildly rude attitude to players, and/or blame me on the current situation NOTE: "not up to me" and "Garnet's rules" are common themes in Discord responses:

I don't understand why the final response was a simple "No", yes Rust players tend to be very inconsiderate and entitled, but we should really have a team of trusted staff to spectate suspected hackers.

That is not what should be happening when you mention we have staff which you trust, as well as 3 pages worth of over 50 staff applications. (yes, half of them are probably junk, but 20 staff could EASILY handle 6 servers)

Not sure why you'd state this is not up to you when it is LITERALLY the description of the role you are paid to complete

 

 

Naturally, I had contacted Chewy (and to his credit he'd also reached out to me prior while I was working on Gmod but I could not response) and I asked to reach a resolution, when he let me know he is absolutely not able to do anything until I "update the servers with certain permissionsets" (paraphrasing).  I explained to him I would need a detailed sheet of what is missing from the servers, and I believe it was shortly after we came to a resolution of using a shared google document (much like I do with the Gmod servers and their respective management teams). We reached our resolution, he forwarded me a document and I rushed to get done with a few GMod updates and spent the entirety of this day handling the Rust servers.

 

To my surprise, the Rust document itself had absolutely NOTHING in regards to staffing or staff not being able to do a thing, other than a Discord role and a forums role. That was it when it comes to giving Staff 'extra necessary permissions for staffing' ??? 

While the document did have alot of useful information and known bugs, a portion of them were outdated and no longer relevant as they been previously fixed by me (may have required a wipe to show).  When it comes to our dire lack of staffing, I assumed it would be specified what is incomplete on Chewy's behalf for him to complete his end of the operation,  which again, includes training staff and monitoring their behavior. To reiterate, to the best of my knowledge, all the document requested (staffing wise) was for him to have an Owner/Rust Manager tag of sorts on Discord allowing him to create staff rooms (despite the fact I am continuously encouraging the use of Teamspeak) as well as forum/discord permissions for staff unrelated to the in-game experience. These features do not promote more staffing and the catching of hackers within the servers, sure they allow for more communication, however, I would be happier having a "GarnetGaming.net | Rust Staff" Discord, which I am currently creating, as opposed to further cluttering our already massive Discord.

 

To summarize: I do not take kindly at all to acting in a condescending way towards players, and taking all the blame off of yourself while using myself as a scapegoat. In the past two weeks, I've seen multiple instances where hackers spent an entire day on the server and went unpunished, on Anarchy, Oscar, and Sierra throughout the past 2 weeks. Is this Chewy's fault? no. Are players leaving as a direct result of Chewy's actions? no. HOWEVER Chewy WAS given a part-time role to remedy said issues - while he's not going to be a millionaire anytime soon from it, it is something many young adults would LOVE to dedicate time to during this pandemic, seeing as it allows for having a big enough boost in income as to pay off ALL your bills, or at the very least rent for a small apartment. To me the error seems to be where my busy schedule led Chewy to believe that he is a one-man-operation when there are nearly 50 users right now trying to apply for staff and ease the symptoms.

I do think I made a good job breaking down how staffing on Rust would work?

Welp, time to break it down publicly:

Rust players,

The Admin rank is quite literally a rank BUILT INTO RUST'S BASE CODE - me/we/the Rust team need to seek trustworthy individuals who are capable of using the rank for good on servers they do NOT intend to ever main. At this time, Moderators are strictly chat moderators who are able to mute players' chat and also serve as a proxy in forwarding confirmed hacking reports to administrators. Currently, players who Chewy deems fit for the role will receive RCON access for banning users with ample proof. Chewy will simply message me their SteamID/Email address, and they will receive an automated email with log-in information.

 

Overall I am hoping Rust changes for the better, as I am currently burning an over $2,000 hole (minus the occasional kit donations) in our funding monthly, simply waiting for things to change. I really do wish I had the time to moderate some of our servers . Chewy, I am trying my best to get to things ASAP, however, this update doesn't change a thing staffing-wise, and things need to change.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[huskaii 586]

i think the Rust staff discord would be amazing. Ive noticed the staff from other servers arent really connected, as in the Anarchy staff dont really communicate much with the 2x staff. Having the discord for staff would make this easier. Im glad to see the discord we have now being less cluttered too. I think given time, things will straighten out, especially if we get more staff on the servers that dont have as much such as the 2x servers.

[brooklyn 272]

I agree with Huskaii, I never have the attention span to play longer than  2 day wipes which is why I choose to play the 1000x. In doing so, I don't know anything about the staff that play the other servers. Having an active staff discord would be helpful for all of us understanding each other. Especially in the way we all moderate servers under the same name. 

[Chewy 116]

This was my assumption coming into the manager role: Whoever ends up becoming the Rust manager would be allowed to manage every aspect of the Rust ecosystem, with the possible exception of actual server access (though that was a whole other conversation that needs to be had).

My assumptions were eventually proven to be wildly inaccurate, and that's mostly a failure on my part for not communicating effectively with Garnet.
While I was manager, here were my access levels:

1. Forums - I could lock/move posts, nothing else. I couldn't edit existing posts to fix errors with things like server rules, chat rules, group/roaming sizes. etc. The only thing I could do was accept or deny applications.
2. Discord - I could kick users. Nothing else. I couldn't create staff channels in Discord (which I wanted to do), or fix existing channels (when bots broke, for example), or ban people spamming chat with racial slurs/@ing every role possible. I couldn't assign roles to existing or new moderators. I couldn't even edit the post in the #-reports-and-appeals channel to fix the link so users could actually report someone.
3. In-game - I had moderator access on 1 out of 5 servers. On the other servers, I had 0 permissions (in-game) and didn't even have the moderator title.
4. BattleMetrics - this is server-side access to ban/mute. I could ban for various time frames and specific servers and give reasons, or I could permanently mute someone (no option to give a reason or time frame). I had no access to any other admin commands or permissions inside or outside the game.

I couldn't assign roles to new moderators in Discord, or give them permissions myself in Rust, so every person I hired had absolutely no power to do anything except take screenshots, send them to me, and hope I was online. Of my 4 pre-existing moderators, 3 of them had moderator access on the 1000x . Of those 3, only 1 had access on any other server (Sierra 2x and the 5x).

Again, these were all things I assumed I would be able to fix fairly quick, based off of what I thought my role should have been able to do - not what Garnet had in mind when he hired me. Another point of failure on my part with the communication between myself and Garnet.

Garnet has his reasons for wanting to keep permissions the way they were, but as you can see - I had no power to make any changes for the actual community. Only Garnet has that power, and he's incredibly busy both in the real world and with GMod. I tried my best to keep communication open with him, I filled our Steam chat with permission fix requests, forum suggestions, discord requests and more before I finally created a shared doc, but by the time Garnet posted his thoughts here it was obvious to me (at the time) that I had failed to communicate everything effectively and that it didn't seem to have improved at all over the last month.

My inability to communicate well with Garnet was a barrier that I didn't see being overcome quickly, so instead of continuing down that path and possibly holding back the community and the mod team, I stepped down.

I have all the respect possible for Garnet and the work he has to do (and all the work he doesn't have to do, but does because of the community). I enjoyed the times we were able to chat and work together. I still play almost exclusively on Garnet servers, I still try to contribute to the community, and I still make sure I'm available to the mod team for any questions they may have or as a sounding board for ideas and suggestions they have. I enjoy this community and hope to be around to see it grow.

 

Edited June 6, 2020 by Chewy

[Nutter 15,189]

Not sure if your post warrants a response, but I wanted to clarify some things on my end/any shortcomings,

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

Forums - I could lock/move posts, nothing else. I couldn't edit existing posts to fix errors with things like server rules, chat rules, group/roaming sizes. etc. The only thing I could do was accept or deny applications.

Similarly to how we handle all 8 of our other servers, we utilized shared google documents as to effectively communicate what would need to be updated, we had one as well, but it never addressed such issues.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

Discord - I could kick users. Nothing else. I couldn't create staff channels in Discord (which I wanted to do), or fix existing channels (when bots broke, for example), or ban people spamming chat with racial slurs/@ing every role possible. I couldn't assign roles to existing or new moderators. I couldn't even edit the post in the #-reports-and-appeals channel to fix the link so users could actually report someone.

Yes, that is because we did not utilize Discord, and again, I was not familiar with the platform. Upon you detailing in your first update document (the one this post revolves around) I made sure to set Moderators to their appropriate rank, and give yourself a rank that IS allowed to do EVERYTHING within our discord, with the exception of editing rooms, seeing as those are automated through Rust itself. I made all the following changes within 48 hours of you explicitly requesting them on a document.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

In-game - I had moderator access on 1 out of 5 servers. On the other servers, I had 0 permissions (in-game) and didn't even have the moderator title.

At this EXACT instant, you still have owner privileges on Rust as far as the code is concerned, 

I had let you know of this when you first received your position, and let you know this may require a server restart to take effect, but I DID stress to you that this change is taking place on every single Rust server we currently have online. It was not communicated to me at all that the permissions are still missing past that point.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

BattleMetrics - this is server-side access to ban/mute. I could ban for various time frames and specific servers and give reasons, or I could permanently mute someone (no option to give a reason or time frame). I had no access to any other admin commands or permissions inside or outside the game.

Referring to the post above, same exact situation

PS

in-game moderator mutes hold a time frame, but indeed, the one on BattleMetric was used to permanent mutes that were undisputed and necessary.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

I couldn't assign roles to new moderators in Discord, or give them permissions myself in Rust, so every person I hired had absolutely no power to do anything except take screenshots, send them to me, and hope I was online. Of my 4 pre-existing moderators, 3 of them had moderator access on the 1000x . Of those 3, only 1 had access on any other server (Sierra 2x and the 5x).

Referring to the post above regarding permissions and lack of communication on that one.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

Again, these were all things I assumed I would be able to fix fairly quick, based off of what I thought my role should have been able to do - not what Garnet had in mind when he hired me. Another point of failure on my part with the communication between myself and Garnet.

I can too attest to the fact that the lack of communication was the biggest hindrance in working together, I was not aware permissions were missing, and I was expecting staff to be promoted, and was very confused as to why they were not.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

Garnet has his reasons for wanting to keep permissions the way they were, but as you can see - I had no power to make any changes for the actual community. Only Garnet has that power, and he's incredibly busy both in the real world and with GMod.

Not true, I was literally willing to hand out owner privileges on not only the servers themselves (and thought I did) but I had also hours before you decided to resign, given you owner permissions over the Garnet Discord and renamed it to GarnetGaming | Rust.

Unfortunately I am very busy, but I am once again, as of June making sure to get on as I am finally off of my pain management medications and have control over how my body behaves, as weird as that sounds. (not looking for pity, just factual with what took place in May)

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

tried my best to keep communication open with him, I filled our Steam chat with permission fix requests, forum suggestions, discord requests and more before I finally created a shared doc, but by the time Garnet posted his thoughts here it was obvious to me (at the time) that I had failed to communicate everything effectively and that it didn't seem to have improved at all over the last month.

I cannot confirm or deny any attempts to keep communications open on Steam chat, as at any point in time I have hundreds of unread messages, but I CAN say that the moment a shared document was created, I implemented just about every single thing requested within less than 2 days, which was so effective that it is also how I now work on updates for other servers:

 

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

Garnet posted his thoughts here it was obvious to me (at the time) that I had failed to communicate everything effectively and that it didn't seem to have improved at all over the last month.

I'd like to say that my point addressed errors on both ends, but I still feel as though you took it as an attack, I was simply voicing my concerns with the community who IS able to hop in-game and seemed to be largely blaming me for anything going wrong with Rust.

14 hours ago, Chewy said:

I have all the respect possible for Garnet and the work he has to do (and all the work he doesn't have to do, but does because of the community). I enjoyed the times we were able to chat and work together. I still play almost exclusively on Garnet servers, I still try to contribute to the community, and I still make sure I'm available to the mod team for any questions they may have or as a sounding board for ideas and suggestions they have. I enjoy this community and hope to be around to see it grow.

I very much enjoyed the conversations we held Chewy, and still have a ton of respect for you as well, however, I do wish we got to sit down and talk another plan out rather than letting everything escalate the way it did. It was definitely a rocky start, but at this point (to the best of my knowledge) everything is set up, howeever, your in-game powers I was genuinely not aware were missing, and I also offered the resolution of forwarding me steam IDs and emails alike so I can promote myself when we were awaiting a server restart, and I only ever had 6 Steam IDs given to me, half of which were already our staff.

 

 

EDIT: 

figured it was worth mentioning that I had sent you this on your resignation day and I am not sure if you had seen it.

It most reiterates the information I posted above.